James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928

Bryan D. Palmer

Publication Year: 2007

Bryan D. Palmer's award-winning study of James P. Cannon's early years (1890-1928) details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era. Written with panache, Palmer's richly detailed book situates American communism's formative decade of the 1920s in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context.

front cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Jim Cannon found writing difficult.He was something of a master of
procrastination.Were he looking over my shoulder at various times during the
last decade, he would, I am sure, have found himself laughing at, and sometimes
with, me, for this book has been a long time coming. This is not entirely
my fault. ...

Introduction: The Communist Can(n)on

We ask questions of radicalism in the United States. Expectations and preconceived
notions of what radicalism should look like abound, and our queries
reflect this. Why is there no socialism in America? Why are workers in the
world’s most advanced capitalist nation not class-conscious? ...

1. Rosedale Roots: Facts and Fictions

11 February 1890: A boy child is born in the working-class hamlet of Rosedale,
Kansas. Childbirth does not occasion a great deal of fanfare in the poor industrial
districts of the Greater Kansas City region, where Rosedale is situated
adjacent to both of the Kansas and Missouri cities of the same name. ...

2. Youth's Discoveries

Ann Cannon died in 1904. No older than forty-seven, she had lived a hard life.
It was her fate never to see her modest aspirations realized, or, at best, to experience
them only partially and briefly. Her disappointments would have been
evident to young Jim Cannon, who was a mere fourteen years old at the time
of his mother’s passing, ...

3. Hobo Rebel/Homeguard

Jim Cannon dated his entry into the ranks of the revolutionary movement
from 1911, rather than from 1908 when he joined the Socialist Party.1 “I committed
myself when I joined the IWW in 1911,” he told Reba Hansen in 1948.
“Before that I was a sympathizer. I make a distinction.When I joined the IWW,
my life was decided.” ...

4. Red Dawn

Harrison George sat in a Cook County, Illinois, jail cell in December 1917,
awaiting the trial that would net him a $30,000 fine and a total of seventeen
years on four criminal counts. He heard much of new developments in the
East, where workers had turfed out their feudal-like ruler, the czar, and supposedly
established a society governed by “soviets,” an “industrial parliament.” ...

5. Underground

Cannon was often pressed by comrades to write an autobiography. Those who
knew his character, especially, as he would have put it, “the merit of his
defects,” could have predicted that it would never come to pass.1 But had he
managed to pen his life’s story, Cannon once claimed that he would have entitled
one of the chapters, “A Suit of Clothes.” ...

6. Geese in Flight

Manhattan’s New Star Casino was the site of the founding of the Workers’
Party, 23–26 December 1921. The casino convention summoned a diversity of
early bodies, many of them overlapping in their constituencies, and some less
integrated than others into the consolidated communist underground: ...

7. Pepper Spray

Cannon returned to the United States late in January 1923.1 The Workers’ Party
(WP) that he chaired was now the undisputed center of American communism,
and a few months later, in April 1923, the underground Communist
Party of America finally dissolved itself. ...

8. Stalinist Suspensions

The years from 1924 to late 1928 appear to most historians of the United States
revolutionary Left to be a communist wasteland, a landscape scarred by incessant
party wrangling and bizarre reconfigurations of leadership. First-person
recollections, such as those of Benjamin Gitlow and Peggy Dennis, as well as
commentaries by historians ...

9. Labor Defender

As Cannon embarked upon yet another transatlantic crossing, his sense of
the politics of revolutionary communism was anything but settled. A public
advocate of Bolshevization, he could not have helped but be aware of the
human costs that were being exacted, month by grueling month,with the hard
turn against the cultural softness ...

Illustrations follow page 284

10. Living with Lovestone

The International Labor Defense (ILD) mobilizations of the 1920s gave Jim
Cannon a respite from the factional intrigues that had become a ubiquitous
feature of the social and political relations within a divided Workers (Communist)
Party of America leadership. As we have seen, though, such united-front
labor defense work was never thoroughly insulated ...

11. Expulsion

The Sixth World Congress of the Communist International convened in
Moscow from 17 July through 1 September 1928. It was the first time the Congress
had assembled in four years. The internal situation in the Soviet Union was
largely hidden from the revolutionary ranks who descended on the first workers’
state from all corners of the globe. ...

Conclusion: James P. Cannon, the United States Revolutionary Movement, and the End of an Age of Innocence

The revolutionary Left in the United States has never had an easy time of it.
Opposed, at times quite vehemently, by capital and the state, it has also had an
uphill battle in its efforts to lift the ideological weights of supposed affluence
and democracy from the shoulders of dissidence
...

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